Monday Night Football last night was the second straight game the Packers have played in the national spotlight for all to see the emergence of Jordan Love as the team’s next HOF quarterback, and at least this time it was not a complete embarrassment that the Thursday night home loss to the Lions was. However, in one particular way the 17-13 loss to the Raiders on the road was not only worse, but more emblematic of the Packers “problem” down the road as they approach their bye week.
No, it wasn’t a couple of questionable play calls to blame for the fewest points scored by the team since 2020—you know, the kind that if they work are called “great plays," and if they don’t, they are “questionable”--or the fact that Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby made a couple plays, which exaggerated his impact since the Packers had 10 sacks/QB hits compared to the Raiders 4. The Packers with Aaron Jones out again still gained over 100 yards rushing for the first time this season, and actually held their opponent to under 100 yards. And no, don’t blame Christian Watson for not making sufficient “effort” to climb over the back of the defender when he was falling in the opposite direction on that last under-thrown ball, as some Packer fans are grousing about.
The Packers were down “only” 10-3 at halftime, and that was “manageable” since the Packers tend to score more points in the second half, and indeed they took a 13-10 lead that should have been 17-10 if Love had noticed Jayden Reed waving his hands in disbelief as Love threw the ball out of the back of the end zone on third down. The Raiders behind Jimmy Garoppolo promptly scored the go-ahead touchdown, but a late missed field goal gave the Packers a chance. But after a missing on a short right pass, and then a short middle pass, why not go for “broke” and go deep with a minute still to play? When is Matt LaFleur going to learn that Love throwing deep should only be attempted when you have no other choice or some guy is standing around alone and has lots of room to adjust to another bad throw?
The people who are still filled with starry-eyed devotion to the idea that Jordan Love only needs “time” to step into the shoes of Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre—and for all the latter’s hair-pulling antics, had only one losing season in 16 years with the Packers—simply don’t want to see the real reason why the Packers lost a game that the Raiders were handing to them on bended knee on a silver platter, including missing two potential game-clinching field goals, as shown here:
The MNF color analyst on the radio broadcast, Mike Golic (subbing for Kurt Warner), observed that all three interceptions were on one man—Love. He didn’t throw any of those balls under pressure, they were just poor decisions and bad throws. The first was thrown right at a defender who read Love’s eyes the whole way and was right there to catch the ball with no one player wearing Love’s jersey color in sight, the second again with Love telegraphing his target and trying to “thread” the pass to a receiver being draped over like a wet rag, and the third we see once again Love just cannot throw a deep ball accurately unless there is no defender in sight from blown coverage, such as on Watson’s 77-yard catch-and-run before being run down by a horse-collar “tackle,” which all agreed turned out to be the “play of the game,” when the Packers failed to take advantage of it for a touchdown from inside the 5-yard line.
If you take away the 77-yard play, Love was 15 of 29 for 105 yards and 0 TDs and 3 INTs for a 20.69 passer rating. Even with the pass included, Love still only had a 32.2 passer rating, the lowest rating for a Packer starter since 1999—even lower than the other Brett’s (Hundley) worst game in nine starts in 2017. His passer rating has sunk over 40 points since week 2 to 77.26, placing him 28th in the league after five weeks, and let’s be frank: the Raiders, who lost 3 straight games, is one of those teams that people thought the Packers should beat if they were going to have a shot at a winning season, and the schedule was, as commentators have noted, quite favorable to the Packers.
Of course that means if you have a quarterback who has the built-in skills to take advantage of that then you should expect to win more than you lose. We hear that Love has issues with efficiency in practice; how is that supposed to translate in real game situations? Sure, Favre had worse rated seasons than Love is having now thanks to his propensity to throw interceptions, but he also had a “knack”—unlike even Rodgers, who “favored” a particular receiver—for making any receiver on the field look like a potential pro-bowler.
Last year, with Davante Adams gone, Watson and Romeo Doubs were the emerging stars in the receiving corps. In this game, they were targeted 14 times, but between them caught only four passes which was frankly all on Love. His “security blanket” seems to be TE Luke Musgrave, who caught 6 passes, but for just 34 yards. Overall this season, TEs have caught 28 of 33 targets for mostly short yardage; from everyone else, 62 of 129.
Normally I would say this is too early in the season for a “bye,” but in this case the Packers have a lot to figure out. Here is the latest from the https://rbsdm.com/stats/stats/ …
…where we see Love still in negative territory and back to near last in CPOE, which is to be expected when we see that Love (who has thrown every pass for the team) is dead last in completion percentage…
And we see some other interesting stats which among other things suggest that Love is not only worse when the pressure is on—but much worse, the exception, for some reason, being his third quarter rating:
But look, as far as the Packers are concerned, I’m a “team” fan, not a player fan. If Love and the coaching staff take these next two weeks “off” to figure things out I’m all for that. You would rather have your bye-week later in the year, but in the Packers’ case that would come too late to “fix” what is broken, if it can be “fixed” at all.
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